by Anne Marsh
“Friend of yours?”
“Ex.” She bites her lower lip. “Nathan.”
“The douche.” I remember what she said before about her last lover. When I give her back her camera, she slings it around her neck on a strap. Probably doesn’t want me getting handsy with it again, which is fine. I can work around it. I grab my phone and snap a picture of her.
“Why are you—”
Before she can spit out whatever it is that she’s thinking, a gator slides off the bank into the water. Poppy freezes. You’d think a tiger just jumped in her path and announced it was dinnertime when it’s just a gator.
“Why are we here?” She presses against me, rubbing her tits on my arm. Think that’s entirely accidental but I enjoy it none the less.
“You don’t like gators?”
The look she gives me is nothing short of incredulous. “And you do?”
“Nothing to be worried about,” I tell her.
“They have teeth,” she says. “How can you just walk past them when one of them bit you?”
This from her, the woman who sits in blinds all night in the heart of the bayou because she’s hunting fucking wolves. Does she think we’re puppies, something cute and furry? We’re predators.
“Wasn’t personal,” I tell her. “He just wanted his dinner, and I was it.”
The way her mouth opens and closes is kinda cute. Not like what I’m saying isn’t the truth.
“You ever talk about it?” She stares at the gators on the bank, but she sounds far away. Makes me wonder what she’s thinking about. Or maybe it’s fucking obvious because her thumb strokes back and forth over the little display window on her camera and the picture of her douche ex.
“It’s over and done with,” I tell her.
She shrugs, like maybe she wants to disagree with me. “Is it?”
“Oui.” I take the camera from her and drop it in her bag.
“It must have hurt.”
Fucking understatement right there.
Her fingers tighten on the straps of her bag and she looks up at me. Yeah. We all know what she sees. I’m no fucking beauty queen. I wasn’t even before the gator rearranged my face, but now I’m ugly as hell. When I’m in town with the club, I get looks. Not like women faint or run screaming, but people flinch. They don’t like to look at ugly too long or too close. Maybe I offend their special snowflake sensibilities, or maybe they’re too busy imagining themselves in my place. Feeling that world of hurt that changed everything.
“You didn’t give up,” she says softly.
I snort. “I look like I know how to quit, babe?”
“No.” She grins at me, all that happy pouring off her. She doesn’t seem to mind that she’s beauty to my beast.
I don’t like to think about that night. Truth is, it would have been easy to let the gator roll me, take me down to the bottom, and then just open my mouth and exhale. Inhale. Sometimes that’s all dying is, a letting go of what holds us here. But I’d been bred to fight. From the moment of my conception, when my werewolf daddy picked himself a local village lass who was strong and feisty as shit, to my first years in his castle—and all the years after that when I crossed an ocean and fought for my place in the Breed. I don’t let go. I don’t know how, not really. So I fought when my back hit the muddy, too soft bottom of the bayou, and the alligator had been the one to let go. I killed it, and that bothered me almost as much as what had come before because it had been just an animal doing its thing and surviving the only way it knew how. Biting me hadn’t been personal, and in the end it had done me a favor of sorts. After it was done holding on and let go of me, the scars told the entire world what kind of male I am. I was marked, twisted inside and out, scary as fuck and no good. Sometimes there is truth in advertising.
“How’d it happen?” Her fingers trace the thick, ropy bracelet of scars around my wrist. Gator nearly made me left-handed.
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want to hear the answers for.”
“I asked.” She nudges me with her shoulder, but I’m focused on those five small spots where we’re skin to skin, her fingers on me, doing a little exploring like she really does want to know more. Just don’t think she’s ready for it all.
“Club business,” I admit. “You don’t need to know more than that, but I was out with Spade. He rode with the club, and he was a good guy. We’d picked up a couple of guys who were trouble and we’d brought them out here. Had orders from our club president to straighten them out some.”
She doesn’t look up at me, just stares at my arm like it’s the most interesting thing she’s ever seen. But she asked, and now I’m telling, and it’s too late for her to be sorry.
“We put them down,” I tell her. “I’d do it again, too.”
This time, I see her flinch.
Too fucking bad.
This is how life works.
Sometimes you have to teach people a lesson, or they just keep breaking rules and crossing lines. My business that night had been with a wolf and two humans. They’d crossed Big Red at some point, and then they’d done it a second time. Fools come in all sizes, shapes, and colors, and these three were no exception. Two males, one female. Not much of a woman either. If she was eighteen, it was only recently. She bothered me, but I did what I’d been told. Me and Spade dragged them straight out into the bayou.
You don’t cross the Alpha. His word is law, and we’re all his tools. You don’t like that, you challenge. I’d never wanted the bother of a pack—too many bodies, too many wolves jonesing for contact of one kind or another. I liked my solitude just fine, so I’d sworn allegiance and done my best to stay out of shit. Lone wolves aren’t unheard of, but you have to swear loyalty or the local pack will hunt you down. They won’t let you live when they see you—rightly so—as a threat to their Alpha. And sometimes, being Big Red’s wolf came with a steep price tag. That night had been an expensive date.
The wolf went down easy. He knew his time was up, knew Spade and I were the executioners and not the judge or jury. Big Red had ordered him put down like a dog for stealing drugs and running them on the side, and fighting would only buy him a few more seconds of life—and then we’d make him hurt. We were quick. Two shots, one to the head and one to the heart, and then his body fell back into the bayou, arms and legs slapping at the water as muscles and nerves spasmed instinctively even though that wolf was dead as dead. The girl started screaming around her gag, and the human male started fighting. Not sure what he’d thought would happen out here in the middle of nowhere when we’d tied his hands and feet with fishing line and given him a ride in the bottom of a boat. Nothing good, I’m sure, but I guess he’d had hope. Like maybe he’d get the shit beat out of him but at the end there’d be that third chance, a do-over, and a ride back to shore.
Spade looked at me, and I nodded. We’d do him next. He put up a fight, but he was only human. Two shots and then overboard, the water rippling as the gators came out to investigate what was going on. Gators are ambush hunters, patrolling their stretch of the bayou until they spot prey. Something strong and powerful pulled him under, and if our bullets hadn’t finished him, the jaws closing around his arm and shoulder did. Bones crunched and broke and then he was gone.
Problem was, we still had the female in the boat with us, and she was part of Big Red’s hit order. Fuck me, but she looked young. I’d grown up in a time and place where men outnumbered the women, and if you were lucky enough to find a mate, you protected her. I’d never mated, but I’d fucked some in the centuries that came after, and even then I’d remembered some part of the chivalric code my sire had beaten into me. If you took, you cherished. Protected. Served. I didn’t know what those two males had been to her, but she shook and trembled, tears coursing down her pale cheeks, washing away what was left of her make up.
Spade looked at me. “Fuck.”
Maybe our passenger thought that was a suggestion rather than a comment on just how screwed up and perverse thi
s situation was because she bolted upright, throwing herself over the edge of the boat before Spade and I could react. She sank like a stone and then came up, thrashing at the water with her bound hands and feet. We wouldn’t have to kill her—the gators would.
She knew it, too. She came up right away, panicking. Could practically hear her choking on her fear. Something bumped her and she screamed. Guess our work was gonna get handled for us.
Spade’s grip on the side of the boat loosened even as his grip on his gun tightened. Shooting her would be a mercy. It would put an end to the fear.
“I won’t,” Spade said, not looking at me. His gaze was fixed on the girl and the ripples spreading from shore. We both knew what was about to happen. He reached a hand out toward her but she wouldn’t take it. She was lost in the panic and fear, and maybe she knew she was just exchanging one killer for another if she got back into the boat with us.
Those two words said it all. Spade was done with Big Red, done with the pack. It would become my job to hunt him down and extract payment from him because Big Red would never let this slide. If the girl lived, if we crossed him and let her go, we’d have disobeyed a direct order. That’s a capital crime in the wolfdom. And we didn’t know—maybe the girl was guilty as fuck, maybe she’d done awful, terrible things and deserved to become gator sushi.
Oui. I didn’t fucking think so, either.
And then the gator lunged up out of the water, going for Spade’s hand and he pulled back, only his reflexes saving him as mine took over. I dove into the water, hauling that stupid, tiny, too-scared girl out of the water and tossing her to Spade. He wanted her? Merry fucking Christmas. Too bad I didn’t have time to gift wrap his present, but the gator was both hungry and pissed off. It went for me, and I was too busy trying not to die to give a shit about one human girl.
Spade didn’t wait around. Couldn’t. He had to get lost fast with that girl if he didn’t want them both to die, and we both knew it. He’d hit the gas fast and hard, leaving me and the gator alone there in the bayou night, and I’d done what I had to do to live a little longer.
“You can’t even pretend it was self-defense or an accident?”
“Not really.” Not like her opinion fucking matters much to me, but she’s staring at me with big round eyes like she’s never thought about one guy killing another and letting Mother Nature chow down on the evidence.
The gator nearest us stirs, and Poppy’s gaze tracks it. The scent of her fear grows stronger. Think she might climb my body if I’d let her. She’s just about got those cute little boots planted on top of my feet, her legs and ass pushing back into me. I wrap an arm around her middle and hold her close. Nothing gets to her, not while I’m here.
“I won’t let them hurt you,” I say.
Not sure I’m just talking about gators, either. Still, animals are the easy shit. If a gator comes for you on dry land, you run. Alligators are swimmers, not Kenyan marathoners—they tire quickly and they’re not big fans of chasing anything on four feet. You fall in the water with them, and that’s a different story and we know how that ended for me. Fighting a gator in the water puts you in their territory, and you got to get out fast. I punched and kicked that night, pulling my knife and adding it to my fists. But I’d also raised a ruckus, hollering for all I was worth. Alligators get confused, and they don’t handle that so well. Finally, I’d jammed my blade into its eyes to get it to let go because not even I have enough strength to pry its jaws free once it has latched on.
“Playing the hero now?” she asks.
“You need help, you take what you need from me,” I say softly. “We clear on that? Don’t think that makes me much of a hero, if we’re being honest.”
She leans back into me. “Seeing as how you dragged a bunch of people out here to kill them, that does kind of make you the bad guy.”
I shrug. “I had a job to do. They knew the rules.”
She makes a small sound as she thinks this shit over. See, in Poppy’s pretty world, this kind of ugly doesn’t happen. She’s all rainbows and unicorns, except for the douchebag ex she dated, and we know what my plans are for him. Someday, he and I are gonna have a meet up and he’ll be learning just where he went wrong. Gonna make that point with my fists, my boots, maybe my knives.
“So you actually killed them?”
Guess she really does need confirmation about the whole not a hero number.
I rest my chin on her head. “You know how an MC works?”
“I’ve watched Sons of Anarchy,” she says stiffly. Yeah. Fuck that shit.
“Not exactly fact,” I tell her. “But it’s a start. Me and a brother, we had our orders from our club president. Couple of locals had tried to cut us out of some money we rightfully had coming to us. Couldn’t leave that unanswered, you feel me?”
“So you killed them,” she repeats.
“Two of them.” I rub a hand over my jaw. “They were guilty as fuck. Law picked them up and they’d have been doing twenty to life. Probably was a favor, what we did. We made it quick, and twenty years rotting in a jail cell is a long time to take dying. We let the girl go.”
I shouldn’t be telling her this. Spade and I, we broke the rules. We broke the code we stood for and we betrayed our Alpha. We should’ve been put down too, and we would have been if anyone had ever learned the truth about that night. But Spade had up and vanished, and the little bit of a female had either gone with him or pulled her own disappearing act. I hadn’t looked because it was safer for me to know nothing.
“Why?” she asks softly.
“Don’t know,” I admit. “But it felt wrong, and I would have had to go through Spade to get it done. Couldn’t go against my brother like that.”
Spade and I, we’d been close. We’d fought together for a long time, and he’d been one of the few people I’d let close. Taking him out would have killed me, and so I hadn’t done it. I’d respected the decision he’d made, even if I couldn’t understand it, and I’d let him make choices for both of us. Big Red would have said that made me weak, and maybe he’d have been right, but I still wouldn’t change anything about that night.
“So you let her go.”
“I let Spade take her away,” I correct. “And then I went back to our pack and let our president think I was the only one who’d walked away from that particular date in the bayou.”
The rest of the night had been a blur, blessedly. I’d killed the gator and pulled myself out of the water. Since it had been well past midnight (because who commits felonies at noon, right?), I’d climbed a tree and waited until sunrise. Figured otherwise I’d just end up back in the water at some point, and the next time I wouldn’t be so lucky. As soon as I could see, however, I’d shifted and hiked back to where we’d left the bikes. It’d taken hours, and the only reason I hadn’t bled out was because wolves heal fast.
“So you were a little bit of a hero,” she says, smiling up at me.
“Letting them run isn’t the same as helping.” Not sure why I’m arguing with her on this one. Doesn’t hurt me any to let her think I’m some kind of white knight riding to the rescue of distressed damsels. Maybe it’s the way the corners of her mouth quirk up, and the soft, happy lines fanning out from her eyes, that warms me up in a place where I haven’t felt anything in a very long time. Even if she’s spending the week with me, it’s not voluntary. I’m the beast forcing her to do shit, and I can’t afford to forget that. I was a disloyal son-of-a-bitch. I got what was coming to me, and there’s nothing nice about me.
My face is proof of that.
Poppy
My phone vibrates against my butt. Apparently, shoving it in a bag of rice has done the trick, and it’s decided to work again after its immersion in the bayou. I’d had it set to buzz and not to ring in the hopes that I’d be spotting a dozen wolves and that my ringtone (a wolf howling, naturally) would scare off my shy darlings. As it’s almost mid-afternoon and wolves are nocturnal, it’s pretty clear that I’m shit out of lu
ck for today. I make a face. Guess I’m free and clear to take this call.
I pat him on the shoulder. His really big, hard, flannel-covered shoulder. Jeez, the man is large. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy you comfort (he’s more hot, dirty quickie sex than he is sympathy balloons and roses), but not doing something feels wrong, too. So I pat him once. And then once more because why not?
He stares down at my hand. “The fuck?”
So he’s a little growly.
“You should work on your nice,” I tell him. “When people are nice to you, you should be nice back.”
The look he gives me is incredulous. Okay. If he’s ever super sick or someone close to him passes, I won’t send him one of those big So sorry about your loss bouquets. Not that we’re going to be hanging out together after this week is up and I’ve found my wolves, but you get the point. He’s a little unappreciative, and I’ve sworn off guys like that. My phone vibrates again and I pull it out.
Shoot. It’s my backer, the font of all dollars, and the reason my electricity stays on. This would be so much easier if it was a telemarketer ringing me up in the bayou.
“Excuse me.” I wave the phone at Gator. I kind of wish he’d tell me not to take my call because I have a bad feeling about this. Research foundations don’t bother calling lowly field researchers unless someone’s been nominated for a Nobel Prize or the dollars have run dry. And since I’m certain there’s no first-class ticket to Sweden in my future, that leaves the other choice.
The bad news.
I step away as much as I can, seeing as how we’re standing by the brackish water’s edge. The area’s heavily wooded, so it’s not like I can go far, plus all those tiny green mosses decorating the bank look pretty darn slippery. Falling in again is not part of my plans for today, so I’ll take the few feet and count my blessings. Gator folds his arms over his chest, tips his head back against a tree, closes his eyes, and proceeds to give his best impression of giant predator just, hey, you know, basking in the sunshine.