Raw (Revenge Book 6)

by Trevion Burns

  RAW

  Revenge, Number Six

  Trevion Burns

  RAW

  Copyright 2017 © by Trevion Burns

  Edited by: Bare Naked Words

  Website: www.trevionburns.com

  Mailing List: http://eepurl.com/bAz7oj

  All rights reserved. The reproduction, transmission or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without written permission.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Facebook:

  https://www.facebook.com/AuthorTrevionBurns

  Email:

  trevionmichelleburns@gmail.com

  Mailing List:

  http://eepurl.com/bAz7oj

  Also by Trevion:

  The Revenge Series:

  Quiver: Number One

  Tingle: Number Two

  Purr: Number Three

  Yearn: Number Four

  Pulse: Number Five

  Raw: Number Six

  Stereo Hearts Series:

  Stereo

  Encore

  The Romanovsky Brother’s Series:

  Taming Val

  Claiming Roman

  Loving Leo

  Finding Gary

  The Almeida Brother’s Trilogy:

  Lila's Thunder

  Thunder Rolls

  Lightning Strikes

  Stand Alone Novels:

  Dead or Alive

  This book contains content matter that may be challenging for some readers, including

  graphic sexual violence. Reader discretion is strongly advised.

  To Siniah

  1

  This was it. She was going to prison.

  She’d tested his determination one time too many. Underestimated his keen wit. Misjudged his naked resolve.

  As a full tremor rolled across her body, heart slamming in her ears, Veda Vandyke had half a mind to wonder how the hell he’d found her in that gutted guest house—so dark and dusty her vision blurred and refocused every few seconds, searching for clarity. But she couldn’t dwell on how she’d been caught. She couldn’t dwell on anything but the fact that her quest for revenge was officially over. Brought to an end by her best friend. A friend who didn’t yet know what a monster she truly was… because he couldn’t see her.

  One healthy step to the left, however, and he would. She wondered how he’d react when they locked eyes. When he realized the truth. That his best friend was the woman he’d been hunting for months. That his best friend was the psychopath who’d been castrating rich men all across the island. That his best friend was The Shadow Rock Chopper.

  A gentle wisp of moonlight fluttered into the small window next to her—the only one in the house that hadn’t been covered by aluminum foil—but still didn’t allow enough light to see him clearly.

  “Keep your hands in the air where I can see them.” His deep, gravely voice had a subtle tremble at its core, betraying his own hammering heart.

  Flared nostrils taking in the scent of musk and dirt, jaw clenched, breathing raspy, Veda raised her arms higher. They’d already begun to grow numb since the moment she’d heeded his earlier demand and raised them high. Even more so after she’d heeded his next demand and fallen to her knees. Distantly aware that the grit and debris on the concrete floor was pricking at the knees of her black jeans, she ignored the pain—her wide eyes dashing across the plastic construction paper hanging down between them.

  The moonlight spilling in made his massive, obscure silhouette loom across the plastic, leaving a shadow that felt monstrously large. Though she couldn’t see him, his outline left no secret to the gun he had primed at her head. She could almost see his muscular arms pulsing as he gripped it.

  Her breathing grew ragged as she waited for him to look around the curtain hanging down between them. The curtain that was sheer but not see-through. The curtain he’d approached just seconds earlier, so quietly she hadn’t even heard him, and cocked his gun, demanding she put her hands in the air and get down on her knees.

  And down on her knees, Veda Vandyke was. In every sense.

  Run! Her eyes shot to the back door, just a few feet away. The plastic construction paper taped over it blew with the evening breeze, hinting at the dense forest awaiting her on the other side. But she didn’t heed the thoughts that urged her to flee, knowing she could never outrun him.

  Drug him! Her eyes flew to the syringe of sodium thiopental sitting on the dusty kitchen counter behind her. Just enough of the clear drug remained to bring him to his knees, and she still had her mask on. If she could just get that needle into his neck…

  Veda shook her head. Not because the thoughts running through her head were insane, but because outrunning him wasn’t the only thing out of the question. She couldn’t out muscle him either—a six foot five, two hundred and twenty pound man with a gun.

  Seduce him! He had just confessed his feelings for her, hours earlier. Perhaps when he circled around that paper, ripped the mask from her face, and met her eyes, she could instantly kiss his lips. With extra tongue. All while stroking his dick. Rendering him incapable of arresting her. Incapable of turning her in. Incapable of anything but ripping her clothes off and—

  She pressed her eyes closed to stop her ridiculous thoughts. Not because she believed they wouldn’t work, but because she knew she’d never have the heart to lead him on that way. To hurt him even worse than she already had earlier that night, when she’d been forced to reject his heartfelt advances.

  No. She’d made her bed, and now she’d have to lie in it.

  So she raised her hands higher, her bulky winter coat swishing as she did, and waited for capture. Even as the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. Even as the tendons in her neck began to pulse.

  Even as her heart shattered into a million tiny pieces—because her one and only goal would never be realized.

  ——

  Linc’s arms were going numb as well, but he couldn’t bring his feet to move. There she was. The Chopper. On her knees on the other side of that plastic construction paper. Paper that hung down all over that gutted house, serving as makeshift walls.

  There she was. The Chopper. Hands raised in surrender. There she was. The key to his promotion from detective to sergeant. The promotion he wanted so badly he could feel his skin lifting from the bone with his need.

  But he couldn’t move his feet.

  He swallowed the lump in his throat. “Don’t move.”

  Her shadow did move, but only to lift her arms higher—her bulky coat making her appear much larger than he assumed she was. Gun still primed to shoot—he pressed his lips together. His squinted green eyes dashed all over the house around him, nearly pitch black in the dead of night. Electrical outlets had been torn from all the walls, hundreds of exposed wooden beams shot up all around, and various construction tools lay scattered on the gravely concrete floor where the carpet had been torn out.

  His eyes landed on the body of Liam O’Dair, heir to a billionaire fortune, comatose on the floor behind him, naked from the waist down with a puddle of blood between his splayed thighs. Liam’s leather shoes, suit jacket, dress shirt, and tie had all been left on.

  With a small gasp, Linc’s eyes flew back to the obscure shadow looming across the plastic, aided by the moonlight peeking into the window.

  He could hear her breathing. Faste
r, louder every second. Or perhaps it was his own strangled breathing filling his ears. He couldn’t tell.

  He took a step forward.

  She gasped, her shadow moving beyond the plastic, her chest swelling high.

  He paused and then took a step back, the chain of his gold police badge singing out from around his neck as he did. His lips moved into a grimace, and he opened his mouth to speak. But nothing seemed right. He knew he needed to cross that plastic barrier, slap a pair of handcuffs on her wrists, accept a promotion from the boss who’d always doubted him and call it a day.

  But his feet remained planted, eyes pensive.

  “You know… I remember you.” He spoke to her outline, voice echoing and bouncing off the bare walls. “I remember you from the water. Ten years ago. You had blood on your dress. Those animals left you in the ocean to die. I pulled you out and gave you mouth to mouth.” His words almost carried him away from the present, but when her arms began to lower, slowly, the movement snapped him out of his haze, and he growled through clenched teeth. “Keep your goddamn hands in the air.”

  Another gasp. Soft. Feminine. Her hands flew back up. Even higher than they had been before.

  He wet his lips with his tongue, letting a long silence fall in.

  His voice came, quieter. “I have footage from that night. From the Blackwater house. I know what they did. Todd, Eugene, Jax, Brock, Liam. I know what they did to you. It was disgusting what they did. Heinous…” He struggled, brows pulling, re-adjusting the gun in his hand as if readying himself to fire, voice rising. “But I took an oath to uphold the law, and you broke the goddamn law—” His voice shattered, stealing the rest of his words.

  Her breathing came louder, her outline heaving as it did. The soft crinkle of the construction paper that covered the windows and doors floated in when a strong breeze came through, drowning out her gasping breath.

  As Linc watched her shadow nearly hyperventilating, he couldn’t help but think of his mother. The way her breathing moved to gasps in the very same way whenever he brought up his father. The man who’d taken her body against her will. The man who’d helped create him. The man he’d never known. The man who’d destroyed his mother by doing the very thing that had been done to the woman on the other side of that paper. Except this woman had been destroyed, times ten. He thought of his mother feeling ten times the pain he already saw in her eyes every day. He thought of her sitting on the other side of that plastic curtain. He thought of a cop, any other cop, standing in his shoes right then, with a gun primed at her head.

  Tears stung his eyes as the wind outside picked up speed, sending wisps of his long brown hair fluttering.

  “Stop this,” he spat, a lone tear escaping his eye and jetting down his shadowed cheek. A muscle rolled under the skin of his jaw, dancing with the moisture that had just raced past. He took one hand off his gun and ran it down his clammy face, then reclaimed the weapon in both hands once more. “I took an oath,” he said again as if she hadn’t heard him the first time. “And I have to call this in.”

  Her shadow moved again, but she didn’t lower her arms.

  He waited until she’d stilled once more, licking his parched, trembling lips, keeping the tip of his tongue trapped between them. “I have to call it in. But…” He shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know. Might take me a whole…” He lifted both shoulders this time, the corners of his lips curling down. “Might take me a whole five minutes to do it.”

  Her shadow froze.

  Silence.

  He realized she was holding her breath. “Ten, tops.”

  Then, Linc lowered his gun, turned on his heel, and went for the door, clapping a trembling hand over his tightly sealed lips. His combat boots crunched against the gravel as he departed, passing Liam O’Dair’s incapacitated body without a second glance.

  He heard the shuffle of her clothes—the swish of her bulky jacket—as she stood.

  But he didn’t look back.

  ——

  Medical kit clutched under one arm, Veda gasped violently, unaware of the tree branches slapping her in the face or the uneven earth she kicked up below her racing feet. She couldn’t even find it in her heart to fully appreciate what had just happened. Her heart pounded too ferociously to focus on anything but escape.

  She shoved as many leafy branches out of her path as she could in her sprint through the thick trees of the forest, accepting the scratches that came against her cheeks from all the others. She didn’t feel the pain as the stems sliced at her skin, adrenaline surging through her veins like a geyser. She couldn’t complete one gasping breath. She couldn’t think one straight thought. She couldn’t focus on anything but getting out of the forest that flanked the O’Dair estate the same way she’d gotten in.

  She could only pray that—through the muddled haze of her mind and her heart—she was dashing in the right direction.

  Less than a minute after she’d zoomed out of the guesthouse as fast as her legs would move her, she came upon the massive wall that surrounded the O’Dair estate. The wall with a small hole in the foundation that had gone unnoticed by the family. The small hole that had proved just big enough for Veda to wiggle through earlier that night, sparing her an altercation with the O’Dair security team that manned the main gate a few blocks down.

  The blood pumping through her veins left her blind, and Veda didn’t remember falling to the forest floor, crawling across the leaves and shrubs that had fallen, and wiggling her body through that hole. She didn’t remember making it to the other side of the wall, where a quiet, winding road sat. She didn’t even remember hurrying across that lonely street, toward the Honda parked on the other side.

  But Veda did remember circling around the car, cradling her hand on the trunk to keep her wobbly knees from giving out, gasping the whole way. She remembered yanking open the passenger side door and leaping into the seat, making the car shake under her weight. She remembered meeting Hope’s confused hazel eyes across the console, wide as saucers from the driver’s seat.

  She remembered screaming, “Drive!”

  Eyes still big, visibly alarmed at Veda’s frantic state, Hope faced forward without a word and turned the key she hadn’t removed from the ignition, bringing the engine growling to life. Then she put the pedal to the floor, the Honda’s back tires screeching and kicking up smoke as it blazed down the road.

  Veda remembered that moment like the back of her hand. She knew she would remember it forever because it was the first time in her life that she’d learned what real freedom tasted like.

  It was damn delicious.

  And it was all because of him.

  2

  Six dinner guests encircled the long glass table, but the dining room at the Blackwater mansion was silent, filled only by the clattering of silverware against fine china. The faint crash of ocean waves joined in, floating through the floor-to-ceiling windows that had been left open for the evening. The vaulted ceilings made an echo chamber of the room, causing every sound to boom like it was coming over a loudspeaker. A random clearing of the throat reverberated like a bomb going off. A chair screeching against the marble floors like a record skipping. Even the trickle of Merlot poured into wine glasses by the equally mute butler, felt deafening.

  Gage Blackwater, dressed in a black suit, straightened in his tall white dining chair, covering his rumbling stomach as the butler removed his dinner plate and replaced it with dessert. A chocolate lava cake topped with a swirl of whipped cream, a fresh strawberry, and finished off with a sprinkle of powdered sugar.

  Any other day, he’d be fighting to contain himself, waiting for everyone else to receive their desserts as well before demolishing one of his favorites. But that night, he wasn’t anxious to pierce his fork through the cake. The hot molten lava he knew would come gurgling out would resemble the state of his stomach far too closely to be palatable. So his dessert sat untouched, long after everyone else’s plates had been dropped as well. Long after the clatter of
silverware re-commenced and filled the quiet room.

  His eyes moved around the table, landing on his parents—and her parents—before finally settling on the seat to his left. To Scarlett Covington. He was definitely doing a better job remaining calm than Scarlett, who looked nothing short of ill. Her head was lowered, causing her side-swept red bangs to fall over her delicate face. Her big blue eyes were stuck on wide as if someone had super glued her eyelashes to her forehead, and her lips hadn’t unlocked themselves from the wine glass trembling in her hand all evening. Like Gage, she too had scarcely touched her food that evening but was blasting through Cabernet Sauvignon like it was going out of style.

  And Gage was right on her heels.

  There wasn’t enough red wine in the world, however, to prepare them for the moment when Gage’s father, David Blackwater, sat forward in his seat, clearing his throat to speak for the first time that night.

  Gage’s stomach bottomed out when his father’s icy gray eyes met his from the head of the table.

  David’s shock-white hair glowed under the moonlight fluttering through the windows as he smoothed the tie of his perfectly tailored navy suit. “Well, as lovely as this dinner has been…”

  Gage nearly sniggered.

  “And however crude this may be…” David cleared his throat while looking into the kitchen, motioning to one of the workers with a silent twirl of his finger. The family butler appeared a moment later with two separate stacks of paper, both held together by a paper clip.

  Gage held his breath.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw Scarlett hold hers as well. Her heaving chest came to an instant stop in mid-breath.

  “Thank you, Joseph.” David smiled at the butler while taking the papers, waiting until he’d exited the dining room to reclaim everyone’s eyes.